Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday May 27, 2010 @05:17PM
from the did-you-say-thermite-or-termite? dept.

Barence writes "The man in charge of Internet Explorer has told PC Pro that he's been tasked with destroying IE6. Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the most used browser version in the world at the ripe old age of nine. IE6's position as the default browser in Windows XP means many companies still cling to the browser. 'Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible,' said Ryan Gavin, head of the Internet Explorer business group. Microsoft has also been giving further previews of Internet Explorer 9, with demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics."

I've worked for a few companies who did this, but using Citrix to do this. So if you needed to access the IE6 only app, you used a shortcut on your desktop or something that would open a remote IE6 running in a controlled environment that only had access to the legacy app and nothing else. It was surprisingly easy to setup, too. Citrix (like WinServer2008 or X) lets you run remote apps as if they were local, so its pretty seamless to end users, and the client (as far as I know) doesn't even need to be Windows.

Pretty much the best solution in this case, or for any legacy app thats preventing you from upgrading or changing platform.

You'd be surprised. Some of the machines here at work are similarly specked. I just installed 7 on a 1.2 GHz Mobile Celeron with 512 MB RAM. Wish Aero and indexing turned off it is still fairly peppy. I wouldn't want to do any 3D modeling or CAD work, but it does get the job done.

Windows 7 has XP mode. You can run everything using Windows Virtual PC (or get VirtualBox for free if you don't like it for some reason). My only gripe would be I can't use multiple screens from within Windows Virtual PC (at least not easily).

Microsoft has done a lot in the past that has angered large corporations around the world. Can you imagine the backlash when MS rolls out a service pack which breaks the intranets of many of the fortune 500 companies!

Our company has just rolled out a new intranets globally a change from each business unit doing their own thing. It STILL doesn't render correctly in Firefox.

Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?

Right. Close, at least.

I know it's popular to slam Microsoft products, but seriously -- Windows 7 is much leaner than Vista was, and overall is pretty similar to XP in performance. It will run on a pentium 3 CPU, and it will run just fine with 512MB of RAM as well. Granted, you'd probably will need to turn of the Aero graphic acceleration on the desktop and some other eyecandy, but in general it's perfectly happy on a 512MB machine... Unlike Vista, which was pretty much a slideshow on anything with less than a gigabyte.

In actual benchmarks XP may edge it in certain areas (There's some CPU penalty for added functionality, of course), but it really is surprisingly usable on older hardware. Microsoft really did a pretty decent job on trying to turn the whole vista trainwreck around.

KHTML was an underachieving render engine a decade ago, with little users and little developers. Now, WebKit is the world most advanced and most used web rendering technology out there, used by leading companies such as Nokia, Google, Adobe and even Microsoft to deliver web pages with speed and standard compliancy.

WebKit was the first web rendering engine to support a bytecode interpreter for Javascript, significantly increasing performance. They had support for HTML5 video back in 2007. It was the first engine to fully pass the Acid3 test. They created the basis for CSS transitions and animations, and relayed their concepts back to the W3C so other browsers can benefit from their work as well.

Long story short, WebKit is awesome. Sure, KHTML was the foundation for it, but KHTML never was what WebKit is today.

Firefox 4 will work on XP, but without either of those APIs. But if you take away the hardware acceleration of IE9, it's just IE8 with better html5 support. They've publicly said they just want to throw away most of the IE rendering and JS execution codebase and go for something new in IE9.

Also, XP is ten years old. What version of Firefox will installs on Debian Potato/Woody?

And Ryan Gavin isn't the head of Ryan Gavin isn't the head of IE, Dean Hachamovitch is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Hachamovitch [wikipedia.org] I think PC Pro UK may just like playing it loose with the details if they serve a narrative.

But it doesn't have all the features of XP. Off the top of my head:1. Non-customizable start menu like XP (yeah, you can type what you want, but there are advantages to having dynamic menus)2. Tree Views don't have line options anymore (removed in 7, were still available in Vista) In fact, the whole operation of the Tree View of folders is totally fucked up now. It tries too hard to estimate what you want to do.3. Movable address "toolbars" so you could customize the layout and look of your Explorer Window, (IE6 as well as XP)4. Totally customizable toolbars so if you wanted to remove the favorites bar from IE you could and it wouldn't push it into the tab bar for some unknown reason... maybe this falls into or replaces #3?)5. Absolutely retarded Control panel, additional wizards all over the place (extra clicks to change options)6. Status "bar" at the bottom of windows shows too much information, no options to reduce this.7. Ribbons. Say what you will, I'd rather have toolbars... at least make it an option!8. Creating new folders on the desktop. They are there, but they do not show up all the time.9. The taskbar buttons size kind of funny if you have more than one row. I still haven't figured out the rhyme or reason behind this.10. I can't seem to be able to "right click" on a taskbar item and select move to bring it back on screen if it happens to be off.11. Searching a specific folder... ugh. Maybe I want to search through a collection of files for specific words without searching my whole drive!12. Aero snap when you don't want it to snap.13. Excess padding on everything!

Those are my biggest gripes. The inability to customize your install. I'm sure I missed some as well.

XP mode can in fact access the host's USB ports. There's a drop down menu at the top of the window that lets you connect and disconnect whatever you want. I've been using it to connect my old TI86 since TI won't bother updating their software for 64bit.

I use Windows 7 every day... it seems you don't because almost none of those things are issues. Specifically:

1. Non-customizable start menu like XP (yeah, you can type what you want, but there are advantages to having dynamic menus)
- I haven't missed this at all. With jump lists, start-menu search, the ability to pin applications to the start menu and to the task bar, I honestly don't miss this at all. The number of times I've had to go into the All Programs menu to find anything has been close to zero. I was a huge fan of this feature in XP and used it all the time. It annoyed in Vista when it was missing. But Win7 provides more and better replacements that are simple, intuitive, obvious, and easily replace this functionality.

2. Tree Views don't have line options anymore (removed in 7, were still available in Vista) In fact, the whole operation of the Tree View of folders is totally fucked up now. It tries too hard to estimate what you want to do.
- True, but really a minor issue. It works at least as well as Vista imho, and there are enough enhancements in the Explorer window that it's just not the issue I thought it would be. Have you used the "Favorites" section at the top? Drill down to any folder you use frequently, then right-click on Favorites and select "Add current location to Favorites". Boom. No more having to drill down (and thus have to deal with the "tree"). That's just one enhancement and short-cut that Win7 offers.

3. Movable address "toolbars" so you could customize the layout and look of your Explorer Window, (IE6 as well as XP)
- I don't even know what you're talking about here. Explorer is plenty customizable, and is vastly superior to Explorer in XP or Vista. I live in Explorer (as a developer), and everything I do is faster, simpler, and less frustrating in Explorer in Win7, as compared to Vista or XP. And I hope to hell you're not still using IE6.

4. Totally customizable toolbars so if you wanted to remove the favorites bar from IE you could and it wouldn't push it into the tab bar for some unknown reason... maybe this falls into or replaces #3?)
- This is an IE6 thing that has nothing to do with XP vs. Vista vs. Win7. Nobody should be using IE6 any more. Not liking the IE7 or IE8 UI has nothing to do with Win7. Nobody forces you to use IE of any version. Don't like it? Switch to FireFox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. You have options here other than whining.

5. Absolutely retarded Control panel, additional wizards all over the place (extra clicks to change options)
- The control panel is FAR more organized and easier to use (it takes just a few minutes to get used to, seriously). Everything I need is right there on the front page, nine times out of ten, and in an obvious category. I find all of it that I have used to be more efficient, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here. You CAN switch to "classic view", but I encourage you to try the new way, because it really is better. I know, I know, I was skeptical too. I was wrong. So are you.

6. Status "bar" at the bottom of windows shows too much information, no options to reduce this.
- Again, I have no idea what you're talking about here. The status bar is actually defaulted to off. If you're refering to the detailes pane that appears above the status bar (when the status bar is turned on), I find it very informative and useful and can't imagine being annoyed by it. It certainly reduces the number of times I need to look at file properties or customize the columns in Detail display, or whatever. Love the Preview Pane options as well. Oh yeah, you can turn it off very easily... Organize -> Layout -> Detail Pane... if it still bugs you. So yes, there's an option to reduce (eliminate) it.